Parkway Contract A Springboard

Chris Vander Doelen, Windsor Star

Updated: September 14, 2012

Loris Collavino, owner of Prestressed Systems Inc. inspects some of 546 concrete and steel bridge girders which will be used on The Windsor-Essex Parkway, September 14, 2012. The girders are structural members which span under the roadbed. (NICK BRANCACCIO/The Windsor Star)

The people building the Windsor-Essex Parkway put on a show-and-tell Friday to prove how much economic spinoff the project is producing locally.

They claimed the timing of the dog-and-pony show had nothing at all to do with a column of mine this week. Some local companies complain they’ve been shut out of sub contracts for the $1.4-billion-dollar project.

Although I believe some of the complaints are legitimate, there is no doubt the economic spinoff from the WEP megaproject has been helping the regional economy in a big way.

Among the economic side effects of the project could be a permanent change in the way highways are built in Ontario. And a local company may end up being the technology pioneer whose employees get a lot of future work out of the advance.

The Windsor-Essex parkway is the first project in Ontario to employ what are known as “NUs,” huge, pre-stressed concrete girders named for their developers at Nebraska University.

They are a cheaper and lower-maintenance replacement for steel beams, and the province is considering requiring them in other projects down the road, as it were.

Prestressed Systems Inc. in Oldcastle (PSI to its 300 employees here and its second plant in River Rouge, Mich.), has been busy for the last 100 days pumping out the first of 12,546 concrete slabs and girders it has been contracted to produce for the parkway’s 11 tunnels.

“It’s a little bit different than what we’re used to doing in this country,” says Loris Collavino, the affable and intense CEO of the company. “It was a very, very big and cumbersome contract to win. It took us many months to review it all.”

But the company also decided it would sink “several million” into new equipment to produce NUs, which it sees as the future of road building. Their plan is to get so far ahead of potential competitors they can own a chunk of the market.

Every day a dozen PSI workers build, pour and start steam-curing one 85-foot-long pre-stressed concrete NU girder for the tunnels. They’ve got 64 finished. Each weighs 47-tonnes (107,000 lbs) and is poured around a two-tonne cage of re-bar and 50 strands of woven steel, each of which is pulled at either end with 40,000 lbs of hydraulic pressure.

“We’re probably looking at around two million pounds of force” pres-stressed inside of each girder, Collavino explained to me Friday as he took me down into one of the immense concrete moulds he has under tents on the east side of Walker Road.

From the road you would never guess what a high-tech setup he’s got going in the middle of what was a sea of mud Friday.

The pressure makes the girders incredibly powerful – strong enough to hold up four feet of dirt and four lanes of road traffic overtop of them. That’s how they’ll be covered when the parkway is finished.

Special German machines costing $50,000 each do strand-pulling that PSI used to do by hand. Fifty thousand pounds of hydraulics and steel counterweights control the stressed strands; concrete footings go 18 feet deep to hold all that power in check and keep the NUs straight.

It’s a cool technology; simple but high concept. The girders take eight hours to harden but four days to cure in summer under tents where they are bathed in steam heated by natural gas to produce perfect hardness and clean surfaces. In the winter they take seven days to cure.

Next month PSI will ramp up to pouring three of four girders per day to make a total of 546 of them in 13 months. By the end of the work the PSI crew will be very fast and very good at it – at competitive prices.

“Repetition and volume is what this industry is all about,” says PSI engineer Paul Phillips, vice-president and general manager of the Oldcastle plant.

Another company, Spanish-based, is building the other 1,000 girders required for the parkway on a temporary site on the banks of the Detroit River on a former trucking site. PSI decided against bidding for the whole job.

Every day another crew of a half dozen PSI guys pour 33 of the 12,000 reinforced concrete deck slabs they are also producing for the project. Four thousand are already stacked up in their Walker Road yards.

The 2.4-metre slabs will be laid between the girders like form work – which the panels essentially are, but permanent. A second, nine-inch-thick layer of concrete will be poured overtop of the slabs, then iced with a layer of waterproofing before the dirt goes on.

“What we’ve got is worth a little over $20 million, but it looks like we might get a little more work along the way making concrete panels for some of the sound barriers,” Collavino says with a big grin.

And a jump on the competition for the future. Not a bad spinoff for Windsor at all, really.

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